Audiences demand moor

CHIP LOCKWOOD/YH

At the Whitney Humanities Center this weekend, you can see a production of Othello that shows off the essential scholar's Shakespeare: witty puns, some captivatingly archaic language, and finely wrought soliloquies—but also the kind of entertainment that kept the rabble in the Globe Theater coming back for more. Amour. Adultery. Scheming. Suspicion. Humiliation. And all in copious supply. Death by strangling. Lots of swordplay. Falling on swords, even.

Shakespeare lays out a tragedy in grand Elizabethan style, and this production makes a noble attempt to realize that tragic grandeur, but at points it can't quite measure up. The pace is snappy, the speeches are crisply delivered, and the intricate, period-inspired costumes are nothing less than gorgeous. Still, too often there is only a faint suggestion of the kind of sheer dramatic excitement that emanates from the nuances of speech, the subtleties of timing, and the looks in the eyes of actors in a production that works.

The Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley once wrote of Othello that he is "the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes," that he "does not belong to our world." But Othello, played by Reggie Austin, BK '01, seems for the most part predictable, not otherworldly. He is much more comfortable stiffly defending his love for Desdemona (Tracy Appleton, JE '01) before her frantically enraged father, played by Yale professor James Luce, than in seizing her in a rapturous carnal embrace. Austin plays Othello as if he were Hamlet rather than the adventurous Moor of Venice. Yet as the calculations of the archetypal evildoer Iago, played with perfect insidiousness by David Blasher, DC '01, begin to take hold over Othello's brooding mind, Austin's performance grows in intensity and imagination. When convinced that Desdemona has prostituted herself to Cassio, played sensitively by Walter Brandes, Austin becomes almost ecstatic in his sense of betrayal. The performance of Appleton reaches a feverish pitch in Desdemona's struggle to understand Othello scornful rejection. Throughout the production Appleton displays, in her brilliant blue eyes, that tenuous intermarriage of gaiety and uncertainty which so aptly characterizes Desdemona's condition.

Blasher, as Iago, in many ways steals the show: he's mastered everything from the slinking walk and seductive hip-thrusts to the cunning smile and lightning-fast speech of the closest thing to a devil that Shakespeare invented. In one striking moment, Blasher proceeds to offer a not particularly Shakespearean interpretation of the phrase "to piss off": he loosens his pants before an imagined toilet to illustrate how he will "pour pestilence" into Othello's ear.

After seeing Othello, you'll be convinced that coming to Shakespeare through the theater, rather than through the classroom or the library, is anything but a bad idea. "The play's the thing," Shakespeare reminds us. But after seeing this Othello, you might also consider giving the words on the page more than a cursory glance.

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